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Valve Announce A Family Sharing Plan For Steam That Lets People Access And Play Your Games

Valve have today announced plans to add a Familly Sharing plan to Steam, which allows you to share your games library with friends and family.

Of course there are going to be certain limitations in place, namely that only one person can access the library at any given time, so if you’re playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II then nobody on your sharing plan can access any of the games within your library, instead they’ve got to wait for you to finish. The library owner will always take precedence, though, so you’ll never find yourself firing up Steam only to discover you can’t play anything because someone else is amusing themselves with your copy of Peggle. The person playing will be given a few minutes to quit, or they can purchase the game and carry on.

The system in currently in Beta, and you’ll be allowed to assign up to ten devices to your sharing play. Not every game will be available to share, and there will be other limitations in place, but we’ll get more details as time goes on.

Of course Microsoft were originally implementing a very similiar system with their Xbox One when they first announced the console, and indeed it was one of the few features gamers were actually pleased about. Sadly the Xbox One’s family plan went out of the window when Microsoft discarded many of their ideas, but could still possibly make a return.

The Steam Family Sharing is currently awaiting its Beta launch next week. You can sign up to try it out HERE.